Corporate communications ?= internal marketing

Corporate communications ?= internal marketing
Photo by Eric Ziegler
Isn't a corporate communications teams really just internal marketing team? Why don't they act like external marketing teams, using the same techniques?  The ones that I know, have not changed their ways to match the methods external marketing. In some instances, they don't embrace some of the newer ideas and technologies.

Are there reasons why? My guess? The biggest reason is probably that the focus and value provided by these corporate communications teams is perceived to not be as high as the ones that are "driving" people to purchase the products and services of the company. Because of that, they do not get the funding or the encouragement to step outside of the basic tools they are provided.

Unfortunately, enterprise communications teams are probalby more valuable than most people think.  They have the ability to really drive change in the organization, change to processes and new technologies. And unfortunately, they are often left with either the lack of tools to do the job of external marketing teams or the lack the ability to realize that they could be more like the external marketing teams.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

I wonder ... Enterprise profile photos in search results

I wonder ... Enterprise profile photos in search results
Photo by Eric Ziegler
I know that google has gone away from authorship and providing image previews, but I still wonder if there is some value in providing an image of the authori/authors next to search results. I believe that there is some serious value in the enterprise of showing all authors of a document or a piece of content, so people know who all contributed to the content.

I wonder if there could be some sort of UI design that would provide images of the authors in certain instances (they are authorities on a subject in the enterprise?) and not show the author images in the search results for when they are not the recognized authority on a topic.  Similar to my last post, this technique would most likely drive people to the "higher authority" content.

The only thing that puts some level of doubt into my mind is the changes that Google recently did to their search results. I wonder if they found that the pictures did not add that much to how people found the content they were looking for. I wonder if they determined that having those images did not improve the "trust" that people had for the content.  If that is the case, I wonder if providing profile photos next to the search results would increase or decrease the trust people had related to the content.  

I wonder...

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

Images, previews and search results - how to attract bees to honey

Photo by Eric Ziegler
Much of the content in an enterprise intranet is documents. Documents of procedures, project plans, division and department policies, design document to, legal documents, etc. In fact this type of content completely overwhelms the content found related to corporate news, corporate communications and corporate policies. So how do you attract people to the content that is more important?

When people search for content, all content in the search results are not made equal and different techniques should be used to attract people to the content. One method is to provide an image or snippet of the actual content in the search results. Through semantic search, search should be able to determine which results should have an image, based on the quality of the snippet and the relative importance of the content. This technique means that not all search results would have an image snippet but rather a subset of the search results.

The two reasons why I came up with restricting images in the search results include:
  1. By only providing images for some content, the search engine can help drive people to specific content. For example, content that is growing in authority but does not have the highest authority score might have an image snippet provided.
  2. If all results had images, the search results would get over cluttered and the power of providing an image is actually a net negative, not a net positive.
To try to help the end user, I suggest that some images are provided and in other instances, the search results provides a way for people to click to get to a "preview" of the content. The image snippet would be a lower quality, less informative version of the preview. The images would attract employees to click the preview or go directly to the content, while the preview would allow people unsure if the content was what they were looking for a way to determine if the content is really what they were looking for.

And if you had not thought of it, the behavior of the image snippet and the viewing of the preview  can all feed into determining the best search results through authority and semantic methods.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.


Click through rates (#CTR) and search basics 101

Click through rates (#CTR) and search basics 101
Photo by Eric Ziegler
I recently completed reading and taking rough notes from David Amerland's Google Semantic Search. The books is well worth the exercise of reading. I recommend that you read through the book while expanding your thinking by trying to determine how it might apply beyond what David discusses. While I indicated that I am done reading the book, I still have 30+ rough notes to convert to intelligent blog posts. So sit back and relax over the next several weeks as I review and share my thoughts generated by David's book.

Today's thoughts are pretty simple and to the point. As I read David's book, I realize that I am relearning many concepts that I once knew while learning many new concepts. This post is about click through rates (#CTR) and the impacts that they have on search results. I am relearning CTR and also learned some new thoughts and concepts. What I knew was that CTRs include the number of people that clicks a link to go to a site. What I learned beyond what I knew was that CTR also how long the person stays on the page or site.

And the great thing about this is that semantic search finds value in analyzing the length of time someone visits a site or a piece of content. Semantic search infers that the quality of content is higher when a person reads the sites pages and content for longer periods of time. Basically, the longer people stay, the higher the likelihood the content is quality and the more trustworthy the content should be treated.

And the beauty of this is, that this basic principal applies to semantic search in the enterprise. And such a simple concept can have a very large impact on search results in the enterprise allowing people to find the content that is most valuable and most trust worthy.

Love it - search basics 101.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

Helping corporate communication find value with an #ESN

Photo by Eric Ziegler
In my previous post, I talked about helping team find the value in using a new technology.  In this post, I am going to focus on one very specific example. Helping a corporate communications team that is stuck in their old methods of communication style.

In the traditional corporate communications world, most teams are just familiar with the intranet and email as primary vehicles to communications. In many cases this specific team will resist the desire to change communication methods. My guess on why they resist? They don't see the value. They are uncertain and doubt that a new method might be better. As I stated in my last post, to help a team like this find value, their biggest concerns, their biggest issues with communication need to be understood.  For example, are they seeing a drop in people reading their communications?  Are they hearing that people only hear about events after they occur?  Are they hearing that people can't find appropriate content?  

So when a new technology like an Enterprise Social Network (#ESN) is implemented, identifying solutions that will reduce the issues they see today is a great way of getting a team like this to adopt the new technology. So the question is how can an ESN help corporate communications with these hypothetical issues?

By using an ESN to advertise and promote the latest news article or event, people visiting the ESN will start to read more of the content. It is a secondary channel to share and obtain a greater readership. And if done well, the reach of the message could be even larger, as people share and re-share the information.

In addition, by sharing out the enterprise social network, the sharing and resharing will have an impact on the ability for people to find the best and most appropriate information and content. Similar to the internet, social plays a huge role in how search works. And by having employees engage with the content will allow search engines to automatically assess the most important information and will allow people to find the content faster (through multiple channels including the ESN and search).

This statement might seem out of place, but ...  the concepts of traditional inside the enterprise marketing has to adapt. Especially as semantic and social in the enterprise collide. The quality of the content that is created is all that much more important.  The higher and more relevant the content, the more likely it will be found.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

Adoption is about helping to find value

Adoption is about helping to find value
Photo by Benjamin Ziegler
In the enterprise, when a new technology is brought in that all employees would use, the challenge is often not with the implementation but convincing all employees to adopt and use the new technology. A great example is an Enterprise Social Network (#ESN). How do you obtain adoption that meets your business needs and goals? Grass roots? Top down?

Often much of the effort of adoption center around some type of marketing campaign. And more often than not, to do the marketing of a new communication technology requires using the old communication technology.  eMail, intranet, etc. are likely the tools that will be used to market the new ESN. These are still important, but are there other ways?

One of the methods to help with adoption is to work with enterprise business units to help them realize the true value of the new tool. Find groups, small teams in the enterprise that will benefit from the new tool. Look for reasons they might not have realized were there to help them understand the true value of the new product. Listen to the employees of that team. Hear how they work, not just how they communicate. Look for opportunities of  how their jobs could be enhanced and then work with them over time to start using new techniques to make their work "betterer".


Reputation --> Trust --> Semantic Search in the Enterprise

Reputation --> Trust --> Semantic Search in the Enterprise
Photo by Eric Ziegler
Based on what I have been reading I believe that I understand that semantic search is built on the trusting the content that has been written. This trust can be gained via trusting the individual and can the trustworthiness can be increased by people indicating that they trust the content.  

Based on this assumption and assuming that reputation is built based on both digital and analog interactions (especially in a closed environment like the enterprise), how can a complete picture of reputation (and hence trust) be built within the enterprise? And how can a great enterprise search experience be built without the full enterprise reputation picture being created? I would venture to guess that the interactions in digital will approximate the reputation in the analog world, but then again, that is assuming that there is 100% adoption and interaction in the enterprise digital systems. 

Anyone else have any thoughts?

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 1853.

Building Widespread Trust because of Digital Reputation

Building Widespread Trust because of Digital Reputation
Photo by Eric Ziegler
In the enterprise, reputation is traditionally built by analog interactions. Even when there are digital interactions,(email, esn, documents, papers, white papers, etc.) a large part of reputation still comes from 1:1, meetings, presentations, , etc. That means that reputation in the enterprise is not just based on a digital interaction. It also means that trust, which is based on reputation, is something that is built on both digital and analog interactions.

What I find interesting is that digital interactions can be so much more dramatically important than the analog interactions in building widespread trust. Why? The power of digital interactions in the enterprise is the reach it provides, allowing employees to build a reputation with employees they never work with and hence gain a level of trust with another employee that would have never been able to occur before that (series of ) digital interaction(s).

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 1842

The Enterprise Knowledge Graph Grows from the Employee Profile

The Enterprise Knowledge Graph Grows from the Employee Profile
Photo by Eric Ziegler
This blog post has a little more conceptual thought that will probably require time to read David Amerland's book, Google Semantic Search (see the reference below to get an idea of what I was reading to understand the thoughts in this blog post)

The knowledge graph is a semantic search concept that is all about interpreting what is seen in the internet. The same concepts can be applied to the enterprise, and to be honest is probably a lot easier to do. If I understand how the knowledge graph works, the knowledge graph is built by manually and automatically. The automatic part is completed by the level of trust sites are given and the level of trust of information the search engines find. The knowledge graph is grown over time as it determine what is most trustworthy.

One of the many thoughts I had on the concept of the knowledge graph in the enterprise is that it can be grown systematically based on employee profiles. The links to project sites, links to primary contacts, links to topics that are related are often found in employee profiles. So Building out an enterprise profile is key to creating a social network of connections. The profile is a key piece of information that can help the knowledge graph grow - growing through the connections of topics to employees and employees to employees and then back from employees to topics.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 1727